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Aug 21, 2025 – A Tesla owner shared dashcam footage of his car rolling over a log lying across a rural road without braking or slowing down. The vehicle was running Full Self-Driving (FSD) v14.1 Lite, the “compressed” version designed for older Hardware 3 cars. The clip has surpassed 800,000 views on X, adding fresh fuel to the debate over whether Tesla’s promise of “self-driving” hardware can ever be fulfilled.
The video, posted by user @donvarri, shows the car traveling at 32 mph on a wet, foggy road. The “Self-Driving” visualization is active, yet the system fails to detect the log obstructing the lane. It drives straight over it. “Mine drove over a log in the road – it definitely wouldn’t have stopped,” the owner wrote, later confirming his car is a Hardware 3 model running the latest v14.1 Lite build.
This incident is only the latest in a string of issues with the Lite version. Since Tesla began rolling out FSD v14 Lite to HW3 cars in June 2024, owners have reported overheating computers, phantom braking, hesitation, and even complete system shutdowns. The v14.1 update was supposed to mitigate thermal problems, but the log‑running event shows that core obstacle avoidance remains unreliable.
The hardware gap is widening. Tesla’s HW3 computer, with 8 GB of RAM and roughly one‑eighth the bandwidth of HW4, was never designed to run the full v14 model. The company has acknowledged that it has no clear path to unsupervised autonomy on HW3, yet it sold roughly 4 million cars equipped with the “Full Self‑Driving Capability” option for up to $15,000 each. Regulators, including NHTSA, have opened investigations into Tesla’s FSD performance after similar near‑miss incidents.
Exclusive insight: Autonomous driving safety expert Dr. Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Electrek that “a system that can’t reliably detect a stationary log at 30 mph is not ready for unsupervised operation. The driver must stay alert, but the system’s failure to brake is a fundamental safety gap.” Koopman’s comment underscores the tension between driver responsibility and hardware limitations.
The discussion on X quickly turned to blame. Many commenters criticized the driver for not intervening. His response captured the dilemma: “Two things can be true – I should have been paying attention, but the car
